What the test represented was not information.

It was a door.

As long as the kit stayed in the box, she could exist in the small mercy of the unproven, where some part of her was still free to imagine that the whole catastrophe was a misunderstanding, that one day the phone would ring and it would be me, having somehow only just learned, rushing to make it right.

To open the kit and run it and hold the paper in her hand would be to make my absence a matter of documented fact — to prove, in a lab-stamped report, that the father of her child knew and had chosen not to come.

She could not bear to make it that real.

So she kept the door shut, and raised our daughter, and let herself keep the thin cold comfort of not knowing for certain what she already knew.